Test Method:We used CD DAE 99 v0.21 beta and EAC v0.9 prebeta 9 software in order to
check the DAE performance of the TDK CyClone 241040 with various AudioCDs (both
pressed and CDR). The posted DAE results are the average of both applications,
but the CPU usage was only taken from CD DAE 99, since EAC occupies the system
a lot more. As a last note, we used the "BURST" reading mode of EAC.
We made a full CD Rip starting from the first to the last track of the CD. The
Average DAE reported speed along with the CPU Usage is displayed in the test
graphs.

- DAE features:We
used EAC v0.9 prebeta 9 to examine the drive's features. As the program reported,
the drive doesn't "Caching" data, supports "Accurate Stream"
and doesn't support "C2 Error info". All 4 tested drives support up
to 40x DAE.

- Pressed AudioCD results: (click here
to see the CD Speed 99 graph)The TDK CyClone 241040 performed well with Pressed AudioCDs and it's average
ripping speed (DAE) was 27.7x. The Ricoh 7200A holds the first place and Sanyo
BP1500P comes third with 28.9X. Yamaha 2200E comes last since the drive slowdowns
a lot after 65mins:

- CDR AudioCD Results: (click here
to see the CD Speed 99 graph)In this test, both TDK and Sanyo drives showed some problems with CDR media.
We faced a problem: "...Both drives denied ripping/playback a Taiyo
Yuden 80min AudioCD (+CD-Text) disc. The same disc had been used to perform
DAE ripping tests with other CD-RW drives and worked fine. Note that both drives
did recognize the audio cd (and its tracks) but they refused to playback/rip
it..."

We used another CDR media (from Verbatim) for the test result. Its performance
was good and got the second place with 26.9X average DAE:

- Advanced DAE Quality:

The TDK drive got a perfect 100 score in the CD Speed 99 Advanced DAE test.
The drive produced 0 sync/data errors, and finished the test with 29.29X average
speed. The drive can also read CD-Text and SubChannel Data as the CD Speed 99
reports:

- Bad CDR Media results: (click here to see the CD Speed
99 graph)

Despite the fact that CD Speed 99 Advanced DAE test stretches drive's mechanism
to the max, we decided to do real life tests with a scratched disc. The disc
was dirty, and with some light scratches, enough in order cause problems to
most of the tested drives. We used CD DAE 99 software to rip the whole disc
(756539616 sectors) and the results are interesting:

Average Speed (X)

Errors

Errors Of Total Disc (%)

Ricoh MP7200A

8.3

505040044

66,76

Yamaha 2200E

5.7

1041038

0.14

Sanyo CRD-BP1500P

16.4

28103

almost 0

TDK CyClone 241040

14.4

0

0

As the tests showed, both TDK and Sanyo drives worked very well with the bad
CDR media and gave almost 0 errors. However, there was a strange behavior since
sometimes the drives produced 0 errors and at some other times they did produce
errors (using the same disc). The Ricoh reads it but returns a lot of errors
and the Yamaha 2200E comes third showing much fewer errors than the Ricoh drive.

- Ripping 90 and 99min CDs:

As we can see from the above graphs, the TDK CyClone 241040 doesn't have any
problems when ripping 90min CDs, and refused to recognize written 99min CDs.